The crazy world of Lytro’s refocusing camera is about to get even more creative as the company releases an update that not only allows you to be more playful with your photos, but lets you see them with a little more angle.
Coming as an update to the Lytro software that works with the camera, all of your old pictures and any of your new ones will have more information unlocked when the patch arrives.
Reprocessed with information from that 3D depth sensor inside the camera, Lytro’s Perspective Shift will let people move ever so slightly around the picture, as if the image they shot was photographed in 3D.
“By capturing the light field, the Lytro camera lets photographers achieve things that were never before possible,” said the Australian founder of Lytro, Ren Ng.
“The first groundbreaking capability was focusing pictures after they were taken and now we are excited to offer Perspective Shift, which brings living pictures to life in an entirely new way.”
That exciting new way means you can move around the photo ever so slightly, almost as if you existed in bullet time and you could step to the left or right of where time stopped.
To see what we mean, check the photo below, and try dragging inside the photo frame to move up, down, left and around the image.
Shifting around the shooting point of view isn’t all the update will bring, with new photo filters designed to make your image more playful even with the refocusing ability they already have.
Called “living filters,” these styles include a funhouse mirror effect, glass-like effects, turning your image into line drawings, making parts more blurry, going to a film noir-esque black and white, and even adding a vintage vignette look, among others.
No hardware updates will be required to receive any of these changes, with both the perspective shift and filters sent to Lytro’s software in early December, so if you have one of the Lytro cameras or were thinking about getting one, both will work with the new features.
As seen above, the crayon mode brings both colour and monochrome to Lytro’s interactive images.
